Website Update

With our focus on improving the user experience, continuing to migrate brand sites from PIM, supporting key business objectives and preparing our infrastructure for future upgrades, this past month has been a busy one for the team. In addition to the accomplishments outlined below, we have also evaluated our work streams and made several changes to the way our team is organized.

To improve resource allocation and increase productivity and collaboration, we’re now aligning dedicated website resources into the four work streams: Business Projects, Brand Migrations & Experiences, Search and Website Support & Platform Projects. The new structure allows each team to focus on the goals within the given streams and not get distracted with competing work stream priorities.

We are excited about this change and have been hard at work adding additional resources to these teams (total of four additional contractors by month end), as well as updating all project plans. Listed below are the owners of each stream and what they’ve accomplished since our last update.

Brand Migrations & Experiences – Lori Armstrong

The build out of the new websites for RELOC® and Holophane® has continued and should be completed within December and January, respectively. As anticipated, the migration of Holophane’s website has proven to be a large project, but good progress has been made on critical sections, such as the agent lookup and the required expanded video functionality. Healthcare Lighting® is on track to deploy by the end of the month, if not sooner, and will bring our migration total to 10. American Electric Lighting® will be our next website migration with kickoff meetings scheduled for early December.

Business Projects – Michelle Davis

Work continues on the Acuity Brands site homepage and main navigation redesign. Improvements will include an expanded list of product categories, reorganization of the Information Architecture (IA), and an improved responsive experience to help users easily find what they need. Any feedback on the current website functionality, layout, and/or new feature requests are welcome. Please submit your questions, comments and improvement requests via the email link below.

Search – Kathy Wendorf

Search continues to be the number one thread of VoC. Now being a dedicated resource to search and overall data architecture, this focus will help accelerate the “fixes” for the search and data issues. While we have made several improvements over the past few months such as, search contains, did you mean, filter organization to name a few, there’s still a lot of work ahead of us. We have uncovered a data consumption issue with the product website pages and this is causing the filters not to function properly, amongst a product attributing issue. We are working on ways to countermeasure the data problem and there is a scheduled workshop next week to outline project plan. More to come on this topic in the next blog.

As you continue to provide feedback on search related issues, please be sure to send specific examples in the way that you’re searching and what the expected results should be. This helps the team get to the root cause faster and to determine a fix.

Website Support & Platform Projects – Jainaba Aaquil

We are continuing to prioritize product launches and business critical support requests in the website support backlog. We are also ramping up our new Website Support team members to focus exclusively on reducing the size of the support queue. In addition to our new support team, our existing development team is addressing foundation concerns as we focus work on projects to upgrade Sitecore and our suite of core applications.

Our goal is to establish overall website stability with fewer support issues and we’re excited about being able to focus on these improvements.

Backlog

As you probably know by now, we use a two‐week sprint cycle for our web work, roughly dividing each month into two sprints. Since we did not send an update earlier this month, the following are the monthly totals for November: 326 jobs closed and 232 in backlog.

As always, we greatly appreciate your input regarding our websites and ask that you continue to provide your suggestions. Please send all website feedback to this link.

Thank you,

The Acuity Brands Web Team